The Dubai Job

One year ago, an elite Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to kill a high-ranking member of Hamas. They completed the mission, but their covers were blown, and Israel was humiliated by the twenty-seven-minute video of their movements that was posted online for all the world to see. Ronen Bergman reveals the intricate, chilling details of the mission and investigates how Israel's vaunted spy agency did things so spectacularly wrong

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Monday, January 18, 2010. Morning
At 6:45 a.m., the first members of an Israeli hit squad land at Dubai International Airport and fan out through the city to await further instructions. Over the next nineteen hours, the rest of the team—at least twenty-seven members—will arrive on flights from Zurich, Rome, Paris, and Frankfurt. They have come to kill a man named Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, a Hamas leader whose code name within the Mossad—the Israeli intelligence agency—is Plasma Screen.

Most of the operatives here are members of a secretive unit within the Mossad known as Caesarea, a self-contained organization that is responsible for the agency's most dangerous and critical missions: assassinations, sabotage, penetration of high-security installations. Caesarea's "fighters," as they are known, are the elite of the Mossad. They rarely interact with other operatives and stay away from Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv, instead undergoing intensive training at a separate facility to which no one else in the agency has access. They are forbidden from ever using their real names, even in private conversation, and—with the exception of their spouses—their families and closest friends are unaware of what they do. As one longtime Caesarea fighter recently told me, "If the Mossad is the temple of Israel's intelligence community, then Caesarea is its holy of holies."

In the course of reporting this story, GQ has learned that this is Caesarea's second attempt to kill Al-Mabhouh. On a previous trip to Dubai two months earlier, in November 2009, the same team tried to poison him. It is not known precisely how the team administered the toxin in their first attempt, though the suspicion is that they either slipped it into a drink or smeared it on one of the fixtures in his hotel room. Al-Mabhouh fell mysteriously ill but eventually recovered, and was never aware he'd been poisoned by Israeli operatives. This time, nothing will be left to chance; it has been determined in advance that the team will leave Dubai only after they have confirmed with their own eyes that Plasma Screen is dead.*

Al-Mabhouh has been on the Mossad's list of assassination targets (see box on page 40) since 1989, after he and an accomplice named Muhammad Nasser abducted and murdered two Israeli soldiers near the Negev Desert in southern Israel. In an interview he gave to the Al Jazeera network, Al-Mabhouh recalled one of those killings in detail. "We disguised ourselves as religious Jews with skullcaps on our heads like rabbis," he said. He went on to describe picking up the soldier, Avi Sasportas, at a place called Hodayah Junction and offering him a ride. "I was driving, and the door behind me was neutralized. We took care of that beforehand. I told him in Hebrew, 'Get in on the other side, the door's broken.' He walked around and sat in the back seat. I and Abu Sahib [Nasser] had a predetermined signal. We had fixed that at the right moment I would make a sign with my hand, because I could see what was happening on the road in front and behind. And indeed, about three kilometers after the crossroads I signaled to Abu Sahib. Abu Sahib shot him with his Beretta pistol. I heard him breathe heavily and die. He took two bullets in the face and one in the chest and died from the first shot. Breathed out and that's it, finished." The only thing he regretted, Al-Mabhouh said, was that he was driving the car at the time, and so it was Nasser who got to shoot the soldier in the face.

In both killings, the two men desecrated the soldiers' bodies and photographed each other stomping triumphantly on them before burying them in a ditch by the roadside. (The body of the second soldier wasn't discovered until seven years later, with the aid of a hand-drawn map that Al-Mabhouh and Nasser had sketched from memory after the killing. In a deal mediated by the Palestinian Authority, Nasser eventually handed over the sketch to Israel, and in exchange he was removed from Israel's most-wanted list.)

The need to eliminate Al-Mabhouh, however, has only intensified over time, not just out of a desire to avenge the deaths of the two soldiers but because of his longtime role in the militant activities of Hamas—financing and planning suicide bombings in Israel and the trafficking of huge amounts of rockets and sophisticated weaponry into Gaza, which have been used to devastating effect since the start of the second intifada in 2000. Support for Hamas's terrorist activities has come largely from the extremist Quds Force (part of Iran's Revolutionary Guard), with whom Al-Mabhouh has formed closer and closer ties over the years. In the mind of Mossad chief Meir Dagan, liquidating Al-Mabhouh is worth the risk of sending such a large team on a mission into a hostile country, though the wisdom of this choice will be severely questioned in the aftermath of the job.

* Israel has not confirmed—nor has it denied—that this mission was carried out by the Mossad, though no one seriously doubts that to be the case. The sequence of events described here is based largely on the exhaustive investigation conducted by the Dubai chief of police, Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim. In-depth interviews were conducted with former and current members of the Mossad and with high-ranking intelligence experts in Israel and Europe. The Mossad, in response to the long list of questions submitted formally by GQ, stated that it does not comment on its activities or those attributed to it.